Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazine

Maus

The two volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, published in book form in 1986 and ’91, defy classification. The remarkable work has a rightful place on our list of top 10 graphic novels; TIME’s Lev Grossman has noted that Maus’ Pulitzer was “a landmark event in the history of the medium — its sheer power forced the mainstream world to take comics seriously.” Yet Maus — in which the artist-author not only tells the true story of his father Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, but also conveys the complicated relationship between father and son — can just as rightly lay claim to being among the best memoirs ever written. Spiegelman draws the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats and the Poles as pigs, all the while drawing the reader closer to the truth. As Grossman wrote, “the cartoonish conceit doesn’t trivialize the story; it makes it viscerally real — it strips away our practiced indifference to an all-too-familiar story. Those mice are more human than most people.”

I enjoy going back and reading earlier works on subjects which we take for granted. There is a lot to be learned from understanding how the earlier generations looked on this sort of thing. Is this book still available in circulation? I would be happy if I could get my hands on a copy. http://www.brantchildrenscentre.com/programs.html